Posted by Brian at 08/26/2008 - 12:00 pm

Episode 1029: Viral Heroing

Too Human's treatment of Norse mythology is kind of incredibly disappointing. It's not that they screw it up. In fact, they get a lot of little things right that they could have skipped entirely, so that was appreciated.

And framing the enemies of the Aesir as war machines left over from Ymir that are running amok works well enough as a way to incorporate the mythology's own history into the game's on-going narrative.

And the game begins at a fairly fascinating moment within the mythology: Loki already tricked Hod(ur) into shooting Baldur. It's at this point that the mythology takes a fairly direct course to the end of the world, but the game takes an alternate view where that course isn't so direct, or at the very least it's less immediate.

Uh, sorry if there's any spoilers up there. The story is nearly a thousand years old, so I blame you for not knowing it already.

I guess where Too Human loses me as a narrative is that it at no point manages to capture the actual essence of the source material. Just as Eternal Darkness felt like a first year English student's Cthulu fanfic, Too Human's dialog comes across like it was written by a first year English student who read about Norse mythology at Wikipedia. P.S. read this instead. The dialog is pretty much par for video games, which is to say, it's so bad that it embarrasses me to picture that the writer(s) thought it was good enough to not delete just before it embarrasses me to picture the poor voice actors who had to actually say these things out loud.

This is the Norse, people. We're talking about a mythology wherein Thor and Loki, the Really Original Odd Couple, have to team up and dress like ladies -- let's note here that Thor has a Big Fuck Off Beard -- so they can get their keg back from Phi Delta Giant to throw a big party back at their house. We're talking about a cast of heroes who fight for the fate of the world even though they know, for a fact, they will lose and that it's their own fault. There's a fascinating psychology to the society that came up with these stories. Throwing around language that you think sounds regal and peppering it with the occasional "aye" and "wench" doesn't really work.

On the other hand, I've played through the entire game in both co-op and solo modes, so the degree to which the game is affected by all the above is pretty minimal. I wouldn't even bring it up had Silicon Knights not gone on and on about how great and epic their story was. I mean, they thought Eternal Darkness was well written too. This shit has got to be stopped.